The Life and Light of Men: Expositions of John I–XII

7M(iy6 OW amazing is the opening of this Gospel! The r iyi writer does not stay to introduce himself to tion his name, or give proofs of his trustworthiness. With singular abruptness, with no attempt to substantiate his own claims or the claims of this marvellous treatise, he casts it into the teeming world of human thought and life, as Jochebed launched the cradle on the bosom of the Nile.

Did he feel that the matter of the book would sufficiently vindicate its truthfulness; and that it would authenticate itself as bread, and light, and water, and spring flowers do? Did he feel that the Spirit who inspired it might be left to care for it? To ask such questions is to suggest the answer. But is there not a marvellous audacity in the casting forth of this Gospel, unannounced, unauthenticated by the recommendations of great names? Yet the result has vindicated the Evangelist. For, as the experience of the Church grows — nay, as our own experience grows — new depths of beauty and truthfulness reveal themselves in its pages, and compel belief in all whose hearts are pure enough to recognise the Divine.

Our writer does not name the gross errors of his time, which were beginning to obscure the dawn of our holy faith, as clouds steal up upon a too radiant sunrise. Why should he preserve these flies in amber? It is enough for him to announce, positively and dogmatically, the Truth; sure that the conscience of man would not fail to recognise her face and the accents of her voice, and eventually turn from all others to cleave to her alone.

Nor can we wonder that the fisherman of Galilee was able thus to write for all the world to hear. Truths of universal importance are perceived less by the intellect than by the heart. Things which are hidden from the wise and prudent are revealed to babes. An intense religious conviction will stimulate the action of all the faculties; as a jar of oxygen quickens into brilliant coruscations the burning phosphorus. But how much must we not attribute to the teaching of that blessed Spirit, who found congenial work in glorifying the Lord through the pen of his dearest friend and aptest pupil! Very majestic are the opening words, and this designation of our Lord: —

The Word. We need not ask whence this term came. It may have been a pebble from the brook of Old Testament Scripture, or a phrase borrowed, as Neander suggests, from the current talk of Ephesus, where this Gospel was written about the year a.d. 97. But, whencesoever it came, it is here re-minted by the Spirit of God, and is most significant.

As words utter thought so does Christ utter God. — A man, newly arrived from the busy outer world, sits among his family, absorbed and rapt in thought. Wife and child are hushed into a great stillness as they look upon his face, which tells a tale of inner conflict; as the foam-flecked surface of a mountain stream reveals the agony of its boulder-broken career. They cannot even guess what oppresses him until he opens his lips and speaks. The friends who gathered te the consecration of the angel-heralded boy had no idea by what name the aged priest would call him, till the trembling hand indented the wax of the writing-tablet with the Divinely-appointed name of Christ’s foreninner.

(Kljdat uttcreir (Bat. 7

So man had not known God, unless Christ had uttered Him. An Egyptian temple bore this inscription on its portico: “I am He that is, and was, and shall be; and no mortal has ever lifted my veil.” A profound Eastern thinker, in the very dawn of the world’s life, cried: “Oh that I knew where I might find Him!... Behold, I go forward, but He is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive Him.” An altar in Athens, the brain of the world, was erected to “the unknown God.” But Christ uttered God. “No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.”

There are three ways in which Christ has uttered God, as these introductory verses prove: in Creation; in his Teaching; and in his Incarnation.

God is Life. — Not simply living, in contrast to dead idols; but life-giving. The fountain of life ever rises from the depths of the abysmal Godhead. Yet that life had been an unknown quantity, had not the Word uttered it in creation, which his hands have wrought; so that the universe is a poem (in the strict meaning of that word) wrought out of the majestic substance of God’s underived and eternal Being.

God is Light. — But the light had been undiscovered, because insufferable, unless the Word had shed it forth on created vision, revealing yet tempering its beauty, passing it through the luminous and yet shrouding veil of his words.

God is Love. — Love is the essence of his being, and all love everywhere is the far-travelled beam and ray of his heart (Eph. iii. 15, R.v. 7nar. But that love had never been realized, unless the Word had embodied it in a human life, with caresses for little children, tears for broken hearts, tender pity for the lost, agony unto death for mankind.

Lift up your eyes and hearts, and behold with devout rapture your glorious Lord, uttering the depths, the hidden depths of God (i Cor. ii. 10, 16). He has not only done so, but He will continue to do so through all ages, as we are able to bear it (John xvii. 26). We have only yet, at his feet, commenced to learn the alphabet, the first broken syllables of the Di’ine Science; but it is probable that the ages of eternity are to witness an eternal progression in this sublime theology. Our knowledge ever increasing our capacity to know; our capacity ever leading to fresh hunger; our hunger ever appropriating the blessedness of the fourth Beatitude. Remember the majestic Apocalyptic vision, in which the seer beheld Christ riding forth on his snow-white steed, his eyes as flame, his head girt with many crowns, his vesture dipped in blood; but this is the name by which He was known — a name symbolic of his eternal ministry — Ms name is called the Word of God (Rev. xix. 13).

Before illustrating in detail our Lord’s three-fold utterance of the Father, there are one or two thoughts suggested by the sublime opening sentences of this Gospel which we do well to notice.

I. The Eternity of the Being of the Lord Jesus. — “In the beginning was the Word.” Is there not here an evident reference to the opening words of the Book of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” But what a contrast! At that moment, described as the beginning, and which may be pushed back far enough to include all the demands of modern geologists, you do not find the heavens and the earth, which as yet are not; but you do find the Word already in existence. The words in the one case expressly exclude the eternity of matter; but in the other they expressly include the eternity of the Word. Moses strikes the chord to descend the stream of Time; John strikes it to look out on the expanse of Eternity lying beyond created things, but in which the Word was already existing.

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